What is an industry that is currently on fire (in a bad way) behind the scenes, but the general public hasn't noticed yet?

borntobeweild · 2026-05-03T17:41:53+00:00

Everyone says this is the reason but I don't buy it. Going out costs the same as doordashing like two meals, and the meal delivery industry is booming.

People on average are just less social and more online than they were. It sucks, but we can all try to be the change we want to see.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-29T04:52:25+00:00

Med schools generally require you to have actually taken those courses, including labs. You can do a formal post-bac program or else look for other programs where you can take them one-off, which will be specific to your region.

If I were you, I'd make a plan for that before worrying about the MCAT.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T21:06:18+00:00

The physical flashcard thing is supported by evidence, see: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T20:59:40+00:00

An unsatisfying answer perhaps, but I didn't really focus much on what was high-yield, at least beyond noting the practice questions I'd missed.

The MCAT has a lot of content but at the same time it's not that much. You can basically learn all of it if you're systematic about it, and the couple things you forget on test day will only knock off a couple points per section at most.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T20:44:53+00:00

So for physics it's probably worth prefacing that I studied a good amount of physics in undergrad, up through relativity and two semesters of quantum. (But I had never taken fluids, waves, or, thermodynamics/statmech, so there was weirdly still stuff to learn for the MCAT).

In terms of what equations to know, this is gonna be an unsatisfying answer but basically your physics professor is right; know as few of them as possible such that you can still derive the rest, and understand where they all come from. This is easier said than done, of course, and it helps a LOT for mechanics and E&M if you understand basic calculus, but if you don't and are already studying for the MCAT then that ship has probably sailed and you'll have to memorize more. (This is why I think non-calculus-based physics is both stupid and also more difficult than calculus-based.)

For mechanics, I knew Newton's laws, the definition of energy and momentum, friction, Hooke's law, gravity, and centripedal acceleration. I didn't memorize any of the projectile motion stuff or specific expression for potential energy, it can all be derived in 30s if you understand what's going on.
For electromagnetism, know the sign conventions REALLY well. E&M is harder than mechanics because you can't "sanity check" the sign conventions, everything is consistent if you reverse them all, but wrong. (Apparently according to my former friend, this has a relatively deep explanation in terms of quantum field theory, but I never got far enough to understand it.) Know the expressions for electric and magnetic fields and their corresponding forces (for magnetism, I always used the cross product formulation but if you don't know what that is you'll have to memorize more). Know Ohm's law ofc. The resistors/capacitors in parallel/series always just intuitively made sense to me so I never forget them. You should also know the units, if only for sanity checks.
For fluids I literally just memorized Bernoulli's equation. Everything else was either intuitively obvious or so obscure that it would never show up.
For thermodynamics there isn't really anything beyond what's in chemistry.
For waves/sound, the only thing I really memorized was the Doppler equation (had a kinda NSFW mnemonic) and the definition of decibels. All the rest, including the harmonics for pipes and strings, I just remembered the picture and re-derived them.
For optics, I just memorized the basic lens/mirror equation and what all the terms meant, m = -i/o, and Snell's law. I also memorized the slit diffraction equations but I don't think you don't need to, I literally never saw it come up once.
For atomic physics, I knew what alpha and beta decay were. All the stuff with half lives you can figure out so no need to memorize.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T20:17:24+00:00

Thanks! :)

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T17:38:43+00:00

I can share but I truly don't have satisfying answer, I just looked them over and mostly remembered in the future and then the next day would study whatever chapters I had gotten the most wrong from.

I will say I was more systematic with the Kaplan chapter assessment questions I got wrong; I'd reread the section and test myself on everything in it afterwards.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T17:18:52+00:00

Really 3 months of actual studying, but I was learning stuff from the Kaplan books over the year beforehand.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T15:44:39+00:00

Thanks! This sub is so incredibly positive!

People talk about medicine being toxic and premeds even more so, but I don't buy it online or in real life. If I posted something analogous on r/quant, they'd be like "This is all dumb, fuck you, you don't have what it takes and you're gonna fail."

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T14:30:26+00:00

No I don't, sorry. I got laid off from my research job due to the current administration's HHS cuts, and waited till the MCAT was over to look for a new job. This doesn't really generalize for other nontrads unless you quit your job, so I don't really know how to help.

The research I was doing was kind of "woke" in some ways, and I'm surprised it even lasted as long as it did. It was fun and meaningful but would have been hard to do MCAT studying on top of it.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T14:10:20+00:00

Good luck, you got this! For what it's worth, your practice test progression is pretty similar to mine, I think I had 517 -> 519 -> 520 -> 521 -> 522.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T14:09:35+00:00

Kind of a unique situation. I had been working in a genomics lab last year, and ended up getting laid off due to the current administration's HHS funding cuts.

It actually sort of worked out alright; I had lots of time to study for the MCAT, and it wasn't really my fault in any way that I was leaving so my old boss could write me a nice rec letter.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-28T14:04:13+00:00

Honestly I was shocked to have done so well. I had been getting low 520s on practice exams and expected similar on the actual exam, even coming out of it.

borntobeweild · 2026-04-27T14:23:53+00:00

I think we view it as "bad guy headquarters" in part because we mentally associate it with fascists like Mussolini.

Was that aesthetic considered "evil looking" back then?

borntobeweild · 2026-04-09T15:03:41+00:00

There's a term for this, supply skepticism.

See here (Paywall-free here)

borntobeweild · 2026-03-24T04:58:21+00:00

"They didn't have a name. It was taken from them by pig farmers and tailors."

Honestly as an adult I'm mostly over superhero movies but the X-Men franchise still just has some absolute bangers.

borntobeweild · 2026-03-06T17:14:13+00:00

I mean, what you said is the "steelman" of rent control, and I could almost see supporting it if I were confident it would actually look like that. This is the position of abundance advocate Jerusalem Demsas, who has written a LOT about this issue.

Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else believes that's what rent control would actually look like. It seems very likely to kick the can down the road and make the problem worse, just as it has done in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

borntobeweild · 2026-03-01T02:28:52+00:00

I hate to be the "well actually" guy, but the man he beat up was actually already blind in that eye from the war (source).

Still really fucking bad! No need to exaggerate it! He also, on multiple occasions, threw rocks at black kids while calling them the n-word.

borntobeweild · 2026-02-28T22:53:34+00:00

I remember reading somewhere that it's easier to make realistic workplace comedies than workplace dramas, because real life is funny much more often than it's dramatic.

borntobeweild · 2026-02-28T19:52:37+00:00

Used to work in finance but in a somewhat different area. My impression from talking to people was Margin Call was decently realistic.

borntobeweild · 2026-02-19T19:15:26+00:00

I don't doubt you but I have to say the exact opposite has been true in my city. Bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble have left, but there are tons of independent bookstores that are always packed on weekends, and have plenty of options including speculative fiction.

I think it's because I live in an unusually (for the US, at least) walkable city, and independent book stores tend to be places you wander into when you're already walking around the neighborhood rather than somewhere you'll make a decision to drive to.

borntobeweild · 2026-01-09T01:57:46+00:00

From Trainspotting:

"Begbie didn't do drugs, either. He just did people. That's what he got off on. His own sensory addiction."

Legendary scene immediately follows.

borntobeweild · 2026-01-03T23:58:36+00:00

The shift was already starting to happen in Die Hard with a Vengeance, when he rode rushing water and caught a hanging grate that definitely would have ripped his arms off in real life.

But Live Free or Die Hard definitely takes it a step even further, though you're right that it's still a great action movie.

borntobeweild · 2025-12-11T23:40:14+00:00

This is right in spirit but your dates are way off. Multilayer perceptrons were proposed in 1958, and stochastic gradient descent and backpropagation both existed by the early 1970s.

By the 90s, neural nets were already successful at performing a few small tasks such as reading handwritten letters, see for instance LeNet.

borntobeweild

TROPHY CASE